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Citizens, you’re guilty: If a government begins to mistrust citizens, good governance becomes impossible

Have you not yet linked your bank account or mobile telephone number with your Aadhaar card? You’re guilty. Are you finding it difficult to fill complicated GST forms? You’re guilty. Did you ever keep cash in the house? You’re guilty. Do you eat meat? You’re guilty. Do you read Mughal history? You’re guilty. Do you feel it’s not necessary to play the national anthem in movie theatres? You’re guilty. Are you insisting on a right to privacy? You must be guilty!

As a Leviathan state also becomes a super-snoop surveillance state, with news TV as its shrill storm trooper, modern democracy’s basic principle – innocent until proven guilty – is being turned on its head. Every citizen is now potentially guilty and has to prove her innocence, her patriotism and her commitment to the newly launched moral crusade to ‘purify’ India. Not guilty? Prove it on a daily basis, because Big Brother is watching. As former PM Manmohan Singh said, the attitude of suspecting everyone to be a thief is damaging to democratic discourse.

This week last year, every 500 and 1,000 rupee note became illegal by sudden prime ministerial command. Any Indian citizen who kept a bit of cash for rainy days (as home-makers routinely do), or dealt in cash for their business became, in the eyes of the state, a quasi-criminal, a possible hoarder of kaala dhan. The PM likened demonetisation to a “yajna”, an enforced puja to clean India of the ‘sin’ of black money by an endurance test of standing in endless queues, risking death (over 100 deaths allegedly resulted from demonetisation) and suffering acute daily hardship. This was not about economic reform, but about paap and punya, a rigorous moral pilgrimage to atone for past immorality.

Illustration: Ajit Ninan

In actuality demonetisation was the apotheosis of state power in India, the super state flexing its muscles over citizens, a national ‘purification’ ritual dictated from on-high that assumed that every citizen was a sinner and needed shock treatment to prove her innocence and patriotism.

The manner in which the Aadhaar card is being relentlessly imposed almost as a punitive measure is another example of the Modi government’s fundamental mistrust of the Indian citizen. Aadhaar was meant only as a means to ensure better delivery of services. Instead it has now become a stick with which to beat citizens, a means by which the government can scrutinise an individual’s private life from birth until death. There is panic among the public, the Supreme Court recently stated, asking telecom companies and banks to stop harassing customers with warnings about Aadhaar linkages. The word Aadhaar was supposed to suggest welfare, it now evokes fear.

India’s Constitution puts individual rights first but increasingly it is citizens who are the focus of suspicion. In certain authoritarian quarters, wielding the danda has long been argued as the way to bring notoriously lawless Indians to heel, but India’s greatest resource has always been its people. If Indians are subject to endless surveillance, checks, identity searches and become the target of perpetual government mistrust and suspicion, the question arises, can the Indian people realise their full potential? The regimented Indian is the unsuccessful Indian, it is the free Indian who is the soaring thinker, sparkling innovator, business builder and high achiever. The phenomenal success of Indians in the US shows how well the Indian genius thrives in the land of the free. When the Indian is brow-beaten and cowed, how can he or she be a super achiever?

Our founders dreamt that India too would be a republic of the free but today it’s not citizens but the state that is free to do exactly what it wants. A year after demonetisation the state rules supreme. Governments across India are dictating how patriotic feelings must be expressed. In Jaipur municipal officials must sing the national anthem and Vande Mataram. Government teachers in Haryana must be trained as priests. In UP, social media posts against the ruling party can get you arrested. Rules on cattle slaughter have meant that the citizen can’t pursue the cattle trade or eat beef. Rumours that khichdi was about to be declared a ‘national dish’ contained an important subliminal message: if India ever gets a national food it will be a vegetarian one that gets the official stamp.

While the drive across the world is how to make governments more transparent and accountable to citizens, the animating spirit of this government seems to be the reverse: that citizens are by nature corrupt, they’re hiding personal information, they evade taxes, they’re slothful, lawless, don’t do enough yoga and must be reined in and made accountable to the government.

Why this mistrust? Precisely because the remaking of India according to the ideological Hindutva blueprint is such a priority. Individual rights are an obstacle to the creation of the Hindu rashtra. Whether on vegetarian food for girls in BHU or the fact that in Kashmir any newspaper with “anti-national” content may now be denied government advertising, the citizen must repeatedly be subjected to a rigorous moral and patriotic examination. Yet at the same time the ruling party itself is seen in an embrace with the likes of Mukul Roy, accused in Narada and Saradha scams. It may even flirt with a Narayan Rane in Maharashtra who BJP once accused of being steeped in corruption.

When the prevailing mindset is everyone-is-guilty, then even the guilty are easily normalised in politics. The sab neta chor hai is a highly anti-democratic sentiment, equally repressive is the belief by a government that every citizen-is-guilty-of-something. Without trust there’s no openness and without openness the aspiring Indian will not be able to lift off into uncharted skies.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

Author

Sagarika Ghose has been a journalist for almost three decades, starting her career with The Times of India, subsequently moving to Outlook magazine and The Indian Express. She has been a primetime news anchor and at present is Consulting Editor, The Times Of India. She is also a political commentator on the news channel ET Now. Ghose is the author of the recently published best selling biography of Indira Gandhi, "Indira, India's Most Powerful Prime Minister." She is also the author of two novels, both published worldwide.

Sagarika Ghose has been a journalist for almost three decades, starting her career with The Times of India, subsequently moving to Outlook magazine and The . . .

Author

Sagarika Ghose has been a journalist for almost three decades, starting her career with The Times of India, subsequently moving to Outlook magazine and The Indian Express. She has been a primetime news anchor and at present is Consulting Editor, The Times Of India. She is also a political commentator on the news channel ET Now. Ghose is the author of the recently published best selling biography of Indira Gandhi, "Indira, India's Most Powerful Prime Minister." She is also the author of two novels, both published worldwide.

Sagarika Ghose has been a journalist for almost three decades, starting her career with The Times of India, subsequently moving to Outlook magazine and The . . .